


like waking up a tree

by DawningStar



Series: Aoba Lives AU [2]
Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 12:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18969070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawningStar/pseuds/DawningStar
Summary: Tenzō isn’t under orders.  The Yamanaka clan head himself had interviewed Tenzō and released him, and he had been very careful to make that clear.  No one blames Tenzō for anything, and no one has ordered Tenzō to do anything at all today.





	like waking up a tree

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the dark fire will not avail you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14871546) by [wafflelate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wafflelate/pseuds/wafflelate). 
  * Inspired by [A Bridge to Span the Tide](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18388148) by [wafflelate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wafflelate/pseuds/wafflelate). 



> A brief Tenzō tag that would totally spoil my anonymity, posted after author reveals! (I have no idea if I am continuing this, but poor Tenzō, you know? The _Dark Fire_ version is even worse off than canon.)

By habit, Tenzō has always kept his chakra tucked in and hidden. Right now, fleeing through Konoha’s familiar shadows, he’s in full mission stealth. He doesn’t want to be noticed right now, not even by fellow ANBU. Especially not by fellow ANBU.

He’s not on a mission. Tenzō isn’t under orders. The Yamanaka clan head himself had interviewed Tenzō and released him, and he had been very careful to make that clear. No one blames Tenzō for anything, and no one has ordered Tenzō to do anything at all today. 

“Kakashi is concerned for you,” Inoichi Yamanaka had told him. “If you want to see him, you can. But that isn’t an order, it’s only a suggestion.” 

Suggestion. Tenzō doesn’t know what to do with such an ambiguous term. Is he supposed to report to Wolf-senpai or not? He doesn’t know how to recognize what he wants or doesn’t want. 

There was a moment just after he met Wolf-senpai when he had wanted something very much, but the conversation with Danzō-sama that followed had cleared his mind considerably. 

Until now, when the comforting protocol of _don’t question orders_ has slipped and broken and Tenzō finds himself empty and more confused than ever. 

What he knows is this: Wolf-senpai is a person who can want things. Tenzō will report, as suggested, and then Wolf-senpai can decide if he wants to see Tenzō. Today, or ever. 

He darts through the trees of the training grounds, trying not to remember. Failing. 

Remembering hurts. Every time Tenzō focuses on a mission all the things he thought were solid slide out of place. Wolf-senpai has been his ANBU captain for years, until the need for a jōnin-sensei who could handle the Kyuubi boy and keep the Uchiha heir safe at the same time forced him off duty. 

Tenzō had always been proud of their mission record. Of his contributions, of his loyalty to Konoha and to their orders. 

Now he remembers Wolf-senpai provoking him, prodding him, testing his responses. He understands the disappointment when nothing Wolf-senpai tried ever woke true anger, not even the shadow of the desperate boy Wolf-senpai had fought to reassign out of Root. Tenzō flinches from his own automatic repetition of every mission briefing. 

With a clear mind it’s humiliatingly easy to see the ways Wolf-senpai worked around him. Knowing Tenzō was never loyal to the team, knowing what Tenzō would report back as against orders, over and over Wolf-senpai segmented off parts of the team and gave Tenzō new orders he would never think to question. 

Now he sees why Wolf-senpai stopped volunteering for all the most difficult missions. Wolf-senpai should have had an ally in Tenzō, not a leash. 

Tenzō has never been a real person, but he’d thought of himself as a valued weapon. Important to Konoha. Important to Wolf-senpai. 

Now he knows he was only ever a chain forged by Danzō, a danger and a hindrance to Wolf-senpai all along. 

If Wolf-senpai wants to see him, Tenzō has no idea why. 

Despite Tenzō’s stealth, of course Wolf-senpai intercepts him well before he could pose any danger to the younger shinobi, before he can hear more than the faint sound of Gai shouting encouragement. His old captain appears without notice sprawled on the next branch, examining a book. “Tenzō,” he greets with his usual pretense at good cheer. Not wearing ANBU Wolf’s mask; Kakashi-senpai, then. “You’re moving fast today. Places to be?” 

It’s entirely appropriate that Kakashi-senpai can’t trust him. Tenzō isn’t sure why the recognition of something he already knew twists an ache into his gut. “No.” He hesitates, and sits down on his own tree branch rather than pressing forward. 

This might be a clone rather than Kakashi himself, but for Tenzō’s purposes it hardly matters. He hasn’t come to fight. Not today. 

Kakashi-senpai looks up from the book, a silent invitation to explain. 

Under the circumstances, Tenzō doesn’t have much to offer. “Yamanaka-sama...suggested I see you,” he says. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go.” 

If anyone in authority had given him orders before this morning’s interview, he would have followed them; he might have been a threat to Kakashi-senpai’s students. He shouldn’t be here. 

He doesn’t know where else to go. 

A startled expression widens his senpai’s visible eye. There’s a note that sounds strangely like relief in his exhale. “Seems like we might have some things to talk about.” 

For all the caution in that response, it’s better than Tenzō can feel he deserves. He stretches toward what he knows of manners, observed but long neglected as inefficient for a shinobi. “I should apologize.” Somehow. 

“Do you think so?” Kakashi-senpai looks back at his book with a bland curiosity that doesn’t offer Tenzō any hints at all. 

Tenzō can’t begin to sort out what he thinks. Is it any use to offer an apology for more or less his entire existence? “I betrayed you,” he says, words stiff with the contradictions only now fighting in his own heart. “I regret that.” Of all the orders Tenzō has followed, those early years reporting to Danzō-sama sit worst and most bitter. 

He had admired Wolf-senpai’s loyalty, once. He had wanted the ability to be loyal like that, loyal to his comrades as well as to Konoha as a whole. His rebellion had not amused Danzō-sama, and Tenzō has not wanted anything for a very long time. For years on end Tenzō has defined himself by his orders, and now, without Danzō’s directives, his whole life is a cold empty thing. 

For a long moment Kakashi-senpai makes no response to his awkward attempt. One eye pins Tenzō with a long searching look. The bright-colored book slides away into a pouch. 

“You were following orders,” Kakashi-senpai says in a light tone that could very nearly be interpreted as acceptance. Tenzō would have nodded even yesterday, would have said that following orders was the only way a shinobi can serve. 

Now he remembers the orders that Danzō used to give and grits his teeth, nauseated at the memory. “I was wrong.” After the way that Kakashi-senpai put his own life at risk for Tenzō, pulling him away from Root, it hurts to realize that Tenzō’s presence made any mission he was on almost indistinguishable from a Root mission. A Root spy reporting to Danzō and repeating Danzō’s words. 

Kakashi-senpai is watching his tense jaw, the clench of his fist, the building nausea that makes Tenzō’s whole body shudder. “Are you angry, kohai?” he asks in something like fascination. 

Emotions are unhelpful and inefficient, and Tenzō _is_ angry, too angry to hide the fact even from himself, and he has no idea what to do with his fury. He chokes down a breath and by sheer habit tries to drag the feeling away into the blank calm Root trained into him. 

A kunai flung at his branch disrupts his best effort. Tenzō scowls at his senpai for an instant before guilt sets in again. “Are they going to recondition me?” he can’t quite keep from asking. 

That probably isn’t the word Konoha uses outside Root, but Tenzō doesn’t know what they do call it when a weapon grows too brittle to serve. He feels brittle enough to shatter at the next blow. 

“No,” Kakashi-senpai denies at once, perhaps too firmly to be based in much but his own wishes. “No one is going to do anything that would hurt you. They don’t blame you, and even if they did I wouldn’t let them.” 

Tenzō certainly isn’t in any position to turn down that kind of reassurance, but it puzzles him. Kakashi-senpai wants him alive because of the mokuton, the same reason anyone ever noticed Tenzō at all. He has a more difficult time guessing why Kakashi-senpai would keep a liability on his own team for so many years. Someone else could have used the blind spots of his orders to herd Tenzō around equally well. 

The sheer weight of his confusion makes it impossible to hide on his vulnerable unmasked face. Kakashi-senpai glances at him and his one visible eye looks...sincere, a gentle expression Tenzō has only ever seen when his senpai is talking about the students he raised to competence. “You’re still a real person underneath all the orders.” Kakashi-senpai makes the leap to Tenzō’s branch and leans in long enough to ruffle Tenzō’s hair with one hand. “I have to say I’m glad to see that. We’ll figure this out.” 

Tenzō doesn’t feel like a person; he feels like the fragments of a sword underfoot, or a hollow tree that crumbles at the first breeze. But he can’t bear to argue the point with the only authority figure who’s ever said Tenzō was worth something. “Why do you care?” 

He knows that his senpai does care. Before, bound from questioning any order, Tenzō had never quite realized the pattern. As ANBU captain, Kakashi-senpai has never ordered him to kill anyone. Even when the mission orders were plain assassination, Kakashi-senpai has always taken the bloodiest parts on himself and given Tenzō directions with careful precision. Create something. Distract someone. Gather information. Report back with a plan. 

They’ve all ended lives in battle, in defense of one another, but not once did Kakashi-senpai use Tenzō as the deadly weapon Root trained him to be. 

Kakashi-senpai would not have gone to half that trouble if he had no reason to care about Tenzō. 

Tenzō, the leash who reported every failure and false step his senpai ever made, who abandoned his captain and team on four separate occasions when the mission orders came into conflict with their safety. 

_Why?_

“Maa,” his senpai drawls, “you’re not bad company when you aren’t reminding me a little too much of myself.” 

That doesn’t quite sound like a lie, but it’s also dense with the kind of hidden meanings Tenzō can’t begin to pick loose. He blinks, uncertain if this is meant to be his only answer. He owes Kakashi-senpai too much to push where he’s unwanted. 

They have had moments, on mission and off, that were not about orders. Tenzō has tagged along, an emotionless shadow, for what Kakashi-senpai called infiltration training and Tenzō now realizes was a long series of efforts to train him out of Root habits, one joke at a time. A lesson in civilian clothes here, a lesson in food other than meal pills there. 

He’d grown accustomed to the irritating way senpai refused to give any orders or hints on such occasions, waiting for Tenzō to respond with a perfect indifference that Tenzō has learned over the years meant he would not be punished no matter what he said. Even if he called it pointless and left to train. 

If Kakashi-senpai has been working all along to grow a person from the empty weapon Root discarded, Tenzō wonders why he kept trying. Tenzō’s failure should have been obvious. 

“Sorry to have wasted your time, senpai.” Tenzō hardly recognizes anything he’s feeling, but that covers...some of it. 

Kakashi-senpai lets out a sigh, turns to look at him with a level gaze. “If I’d known when I met you how many years it would take before you stopped obeying everything Danzō ever told you, I would still have done exactly the same thing.” 

That’s uncharacteristically straightforward. Tenzō isn’t sure what to make of it. “Thank you,” he offers, hesitant, fully aware it’s not adequate and unable to find any other phrase that would halfway fit. “But...why?” 

His senpai gives an artful dismissive shrug. “You’re a good shinobi, with or without the tree thing.” 

Konoha has many good shinobi. Tenzō raises his eyebrows in very quiet challenge. 

There’s a long pause. 

“Most of the people I wanted to help, I can’t.” Kakashi-senpai darts a fleeting glance at his own right hand, then raises his chin to meet Tenzō’s puzzled gaze. “I hoped I might still be able to help you.” He pauses. “Though my first assumption was that Danzō had done something to your seal. I still haven’t found a way to break that without risking your life.” 

Years have passed since Kakashi-senpai made any mention of the Root-applied seal on Tenzō’s tongue. Tenzō had almost assumed it forgotten. He is...pleased? Some part of him warms at the idea that his senpai has been working to figure out the impossibly complex sealwork on Tenzō’s behalf. 

He can’t say any of this. Tenzō lifts one hand to shape a sign that his fellow ANBU would translate _classified,_ though within Root it held a sharper sense of _we can’t talk about that_. 

_Acknowledged,_ Kakashi-senpai signs back, a lazy wave. “Gai will be happy about this,” he says aloud in change of subject. 

Gai is helping Kakashi to train and distract several of the younger shinobi, Tenzō knows. While no one has thought he needs the details it’s hard to miss the way that most of the active duty ANBU and former Root both have been vanishing at least long enough for an interview with the Yamanaka clan. Sasuke Uchiha is ANBU himself now, but no one will want the Uchiha heir finding out about whatever this mess might be until the danger is past. 

Even under the influence of orders Tenzō has never been able to describe training with Gai as pointless. Strange, unquestionably. All that enthusiasm. He wonders how desperate Kakashi-senpai had been to arrange their first few meetings. 

He has not betrayed Gai in the same ways as he betrayed Kakashi-senpai, but what can Gai possibly think of his rival’s rude shadow? Nothing good. “What do I say to him?” he asks Kakashi with some urgency. 

Of course his senpai only looks deeply amused. “No need to worry, Tenzō.” 

“I told him Lee wasn’t worth training!” 

Kakashi-senpai blinks with every appearance of innocence. “That’s not a nice thing to say about his student, kohai.” 

“I know that now,” Tenzō says in despair. Gai had looked so hurt by it, and Tenzō hadn’t cared at the time. 

Also, he’d been wrong. Lee would have made a terrible Root candidate and died young, but the boy had grown into an impressive shinobi in the sunlight with Gai. 

Kakashi-senpai hums under his breath. “Should you consider apologizing?” he offers in complete unhelpfulness. 

Heaving a sigh of his own for what might be the very first time, Tenzō says, “I would if I knew how, senpai.” 

At this Kakashi-senpai actually chuckles, a low soft bark. “Try not to worry. If Gai were the kind of person to hold grudges, he wouldn’t spend so much time with me.” 

As true as that is, Tenzō can’t find it reassuring. What Gai has been willing to forgive from the shinobi he respects enough to call a rival is one thing. What he would accept from a traitor and a threat to those Gai cares about most is harder to guess. 

“Here he is,” Kakashi-senpai points out, with no sympathy at all. Tenzō looks up. Gai’s green form is approaching at speed, probably worried over the time it’s taken for his rival to report back. 

Tenzō lifts his hands away from his weapon pouches and holds very still. He doesn’t want to provoke a fight, and he’s well aware how little anyone ought to trust him right now. 

His senpai doesn’t say anything, but he does at least raise one hand to wave a swift _all clear_. 

Seeing it, Gai slows a fraction. “I’m always glad to see my rival’s friend!” he says, at a notably lower volume than his standard. “What brings you here this fine day, Tenzō?” 

It’s always a waste of time to argue with Gai over the finer points of who should and should not count as a friend. Anyway, Tenzō has more urgent concerns. “I came to apologize.” The words come out awkward and weak and Tenzō is sure they are the least believable attempt in the history of apologies. 

The powerful jōnin somehow manages to smile wider than Tenzō has ever seen before, a daunting level of emotion all aimed at Tenzō himself. 

When Gai forgives him by crying all over him, Tenzō is a little surprised to discover he doesn’t mind being trapped at all.


End file.
